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  • Bijective BWT (7 Comments)

    David Scott has written a bijective BWT transform, which brings all the advantages of bijectiveness to BWT based compressors. Among other things, making BWT more suitable for compression-before-encryption and also give (slightly) better compression.

  • Asymmetric Binary System (116 Comments)

    Jarek Duda’s “Asymmetric Binary System” promises to be an alternate to arithmetic coding, having all the advantages, but being much simpler. Matt has coded a PAQ based compressor using ABS for back-end encoding. Update: Andrew Polar has written an alternate implementation of ABS.

  • Precomp: More Compression for your Compressed Files (3 Comments)

    So many of today’s files are already compressed (using old, outdated algorithms) that newer algorithms don’t even get a chance to touch them. Christian Schneider’s Precomp comes to rescue by undoing the harm.

  • On2 Technologies is Hiring

    There aren’t too many companies working on cutting edge codecs, and of those few this one is hiring. Best of luck.

  • China’s AVS Specifications Available (2 Comments)

    Its old news that China has developed their own Advanced Video Standard to avoid high licensing fees. English translation of the standard is now available, along with the IPR policy. Finally something technical that you can get your hands on to feed your appetite.

The Data Compression Newsletter - August 2006

Posted by Sachin Garg on 14th August 2006 | Permanent Link

Here is a copy of this issue sent by mail to subscribers. Click here to subscribe or to know more about the newsletter. In case you subscribed but didn’t recieved a copy, please let me know so that I can fix it. Any suggestions and comments for improvements are ofcourse welcome.

——————————————————————————————-

Monthly roundup of all news and happenings reported at The Data Compression News Blog. More information about this newsletter at http://www.c10n.info/newsletter/

Hi,

Since last few months I have been working on how to make www.c10n.info a better place for all data compression enthusiasts to get all the updates they need, to make it easy for them to keep track of this industry and this research domain.

To start with, I had recently added a section which keeps track of all industry news and press releases (at http://www.c10n.info/#more_news ) using Google’s excellent News service.

I have been working on smoothing out the problems with it to make sure it gets all the relevent news and only the relevent news. Its better than what it was earlier, but there are still some problems regarding duplicates and some random unrelated stories showing up, I am working on improving this. (Also planned is an archive with search, where you can search for old news.)

Another section which you will see very soon is a “Benchmark updates” section, it will make it easy for you to track any updates made to the popular compression benchmarks.

Among other things which I would love to see at www.c10n.info is a section featuring the latest research papers published on topics of our interest, and one featuring the latest data compression patents granted or filed. I am exploring how to do this easily but I am not yet very sure how.

All this is too much information to keep track of easily and any tips or advice you can offer will really help a lot in making c10n.info a better site for all of us. Besides, I will love to hear from you if you have any suggestions on what else can be included here, or how to best present the data :-)

Sachin Garg [India]
http://www.sachingarg.com

Here is last few month’s news…

UPX, the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables, version 2.02 released
2006-08-14 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/435

Latest version of UPX, the versatile executable packer, was released a few days ago. Looks like a bug-fix release.

Version 0.9.6 of the IIPImage Server Released
2006-08-09 By Sachin Garg (3 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/433

IIPimage Windows installer for server version 0.9.6 was released, its a client/server system which lets you view very high resolution large images on slow connections, using multi-resolution tiled TIFF images.

The Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge Update
2006-08-05 By Sachin Garg (5 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/432

Alexander Ratushnyak updates his December 2005 entry to Calgary corpus compression challenge. Matt Mahoney provides a summary of the PAQAR based compressor.

Dream Data Compression Job
2006-08-01 By Sachin Garg (8 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/431

Want work doing research on data compression algorithms? The StuffIt guys are hiring.

18 Years of ZIP format: Happy Birthday
2006-07-19 By Sachin Garg (14 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/430

The venerable ZIP format recently celebrated its 18th birthday. Isn’t that a bit too long?

Shrinking those monster ASP.NET pages
2006-07-10 By Mark Nelson (3 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/429

Dario Solera’s article on The CodeProject describes how to shrink those ASP.NET web pages.

Forgent Networks Responds to JPEG Patent Rejection
2006-07-02 By Sachin Garg (16 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/428

Although in initial press releases after the ruling, both PUBPAT and Forgent claimed victory and sounded optimistic, another recent press release from Forgent mentions their “shock” and “disappointment”.

JPEG’s Reply to Microsoft WMP: Better JPEG?
2006-06-15 By Sachin Garg (3 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/427

The new ITU extension to JPEG offers better (and faster) compression by introducing a new (backward incompatible) alternative Q15 arithmetic coding. Color precision is increased to maximum 16 bits per color component.

DivX 6.2.5 Codec
2006-06-15 By Mark Nelson (1 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/426

DivX has released a new version of their free Windows codec featuring “sharpening”

New Large Text Compression Benchmark
2006-05-31 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/425

Matt Mahoney (author of the excellent PAQ series of compressors) started a new data compression benchmark, made up of really large text files. The goal of most benchmarks is to try to find the “best overall” algorithm, this one focuses only on compressors trying to solve the problem of natural language text compression

Oooh, Forgent, I think that’s going to leave a mark
2006-05-26 By Mark Nelson (6 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/424

The USPTO appears to have let a lot of the air out of the JPEG patent that Forgent Networks has been using as a cash cow.

My Very Bad Euclid Discoveries Experience
2006-05-25 By Mark Nelson (28 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/423

Euclid Investors asked me to set up a BBS where they could chat about their upcoming fortunes. Ever heard the one about no good deed going unpunished?

Microsoft: JPEG? What’s that?
2006-05-25 By Mark Nelson (1 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/422

Microsoft is tossing a new image format out on the playing field. Will this hasten my predicted demise of the JPEG format?

ZPack File Format, spec and tools
2006-05-10 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/421

Vaguely PAQ like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write).

Sony supporting AAC
2006-05-10 By Mark Nelson (1 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/420

Sony has caved in to the dominance of the iPod.

Will China Play Nice?
2006-05-03 By Mark Nelson (1 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/419

Ongoing efforts to get China to swallow MPEG-2 royalty payments seem to be bearing some fruit.

Burst.com sues Apple over iPod
2006-04-23 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/418

TGDaily: Claims include “signal compression and intermediate storage in an integrated circuit, random access memory” and “capabilities to transmit and receive program information in either a compressed or decompressed format over fiber optic lines, conventional phone lines or microwaves.”

Euclid: More Smoke without Fire
2006-04-19 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/417

Another story, this time on internetnews.com, talks about Euclid’s technology. But its still just talk.

JPEG death seems imminent
2006-04-19 By Mark Nelson (3 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/416

The use of the JPEG format is becoming so mired in patent snarls that it is quickly becoming an albatross around the necks of any companies doing imaging.

Infima - The best executed compression fraud
2006-04-12 By Sachin Garg (5 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/415

There have been many compression frauds which have captured interests and bagged huge investments from stupid investors, but none of them had come close to convincing anyone knowledgeable in this domain. Infima did managed to get attention and get kudos from everyone, but only for a few days.

Euclid Discoveries makes headlines with vapor
2006-04-10 By Mark Nelson (2 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/414

Euclid Discoveries continues stringing their investors along with nothing but smoke and mirrors.

MindSpring Announces Data Miniaturization Extension for QUALCOMM’s BREW Solution
2006-04-10 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/413

Press Release: The WindSpring DMT extension for BREW permanently reduces mobile phone applications into the Micro Data Format (MDF), which unlike compression, enables full data access and manipulation (including high-speed seek, search, edit and display) while miniaturized, without the need to enlarge the data to its original size.

Smith Micro Announces StuffIt Image, an Innovative Compression Solution for the Digital Imaging Marketplace
2006-04-10 By Sachin Garg (2 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/412

Press Release: StuffIt Image Includes Patent Pending JPEG Compression, Strong Encryption, along With a Host of Other Innovative Lossy and Lossless Image Compression Technologies.

WinRAR 3.60 Beta 1 Released
2006-04-10 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/411

Press Release: Multithreaded version of RAR compression algorithm improves the compression speed on computers with several CPUs, dual core CPU and processors with hyper threading technology.

Forgent Drops Suit Against Xerox
2006-04-08 By Sachin Garg (0 comments)
http://www.c10n.info/archives/409

InformationWeek: Both sides remain quiet on the terms of the settlement.

Thatz all for this month, to submit news, keep track of news as it happens and to participate in discussions, visit http://www.c10n.info

Sachin Garg [India]
http://www.sachingarg.com

2 Responses to “The Data Compression Newsletter - August 2006”

  1. Harr Says:
    August 16th, 2006 at 6:03 am

    Patents and papers will be nice, information on patents is easily available on uspato website, don’t know where to get information on latest papers, maybe citeseer

  2. Sachin Garg Says:
    August 16th, 2006 at 6:56 pm

    I am afraid it will be too much effort to keep track of all that all by myself.

    An automated way or volunteers will help :-)

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